The most famous merchant of America, Jeff Bezos, got married in Venice over the last weekend of June. While the world gawked at the $50 million price tag of the festivities, the 90 private jets of 200 fellow billionaires and Hollywood celebrities who descended on the Italian islands, and the gilded and garish parade of all the jewels, haute couture, and paparazzi posing that went along with it, critics were obsessed with the bride.

Katie Couric mocked Lauren Sanchez’s “big hair” and “conspicuous consumption” as evidence that “tacky is back.” Rosie O’Donnell called the bride Bezos’s “fake fem bot wife.”

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“Who looks like that?” O’Donnell lamented. “Why would he choose her?”

Indeed, it was a question thousands of angry social media trolls spent the weekend repeating: Why would the world’s third-richest man marry a 55-year-old woman past society’s marriageable expiration date?

Bezos inadvertently told us the answer in 2019 when the National Enquirer leaked his private texts to a fairly successful but still local journalist and television host.

“I love you, alive girl,” the Amazon founder wrote to Sanchez, among hundreds of other gushing professions of adoration that would be downright wholesome if they both weren’t technically still married to other people.

But even after their affair was outed, two divorces were hastily initiated, and the middle-aged Sanchez was set up by the media to be a punchline, the billionaire was still breathless with love for his “alive girl.”

The mistresses and second wives of the American elite modeled in media narratives are beautiful and often startlingly young ingenues, Madeline Astor or Marla Maples swept off their feet by wealth, or Lucy Mercer or Monica Lewinsky uncomfortably courted by a president who pretended lust was love.

But the women who truly enraptured the hearts of royalty and cemented themselves in history were traditionally less jejune and often less traditionally beautiful. Rather, they had the je ne sais quoi that translates to English closely as an “alive girl.”

The two most famous royal mistresses in British history were the two who unseated more conventionally beautiful predecessors to actually become the queen. While Anne Boleyn was once derided by a Venetian ambassador for her “swarthy complexion” and “bosom not much raised,” even this detractor admitted “her eyes were black and beautiful,” and more importantly, she knew how to use them. Camilla Parker Bowles always knew she could never hold a candle to the objectively statuesque appearance of the late Princess Diana, but biographers uniformly praise her “zest for life” or joie de vivre, “the rare gift of making you feel you were the only person in the room.” Boleyn was likely considered middle-aged by the time she captured the heart of Henry VIII, and Queen Camilla is outright older than her husband.

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Maybe Bezos could have found the sort of younger, nubile, fertile, and waifish second wife the media understands as an acceptable successor to a first one. He could have found one with less flamboyance, a greater sense of shame, and the youthful insecurity that makes one less unapologetic than the ostentatious Mrs. Bezos.

But even a billionaire only lives once, and life’s too short not to do it with your “alive girl.”